How To Get Live Stock Market Prices In a Spreadsheet On Your Mac

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to get live stock quotes in a spreadsheet on your Mac. 

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So I love using Numbers and it was great when a few years ago Apple introduced new functions to bring stock prices into cells in Number spreadsheets. While that functionality originally gave us live stock prices that soon changed to just daily closing prices. There's probably some sort of legal and licensing reasons behind that. Live stock prices are really expensive. However there is a way for you to get live stock prices in the spreadsheet on your Mac. It's not using Numbers but using Goggle spreadsheets instead. If you want you could copy and paste between Goggle Sheets and Numbers to combine the best of both.

So GoggleSheets is a spreadsheet app just like Excel and Numbers except it's on the web. You access it through your Goggle account. If you have a gmail account or a YouTube account you've got a Goggle account. You go to drive.goggle.com and you have your file stored here. You get a certain amount of free space. Then you can click New and one of the types of documents you can create is a Goggle Sheet. When you do that you get a simple spreadsheet. This looks a lot more like Excel than it does Numbers but the same basic idea for entering formulas applies.

So you can have numbers and all sorts of different things in here. So if I wanted to get a stock price I'll start entering in a formula with the equals symbol. The function I want is called Goggle Finance. So Goggle Finance and then in quotes the stock ticker symbol and I'll get Apple's stock price like that. Now a cleaner way to do it would be to have the ticker symbol here. Then in here change the formula so that it just refers to that cell. That way I can put something in another cell like that and then copy this formula here, Command C and Command V to paste, and now it will grab the price of this symbol here. 

So you can create a whole list of stocks that you want to track. Then you could copy the function there and paste it in and it will get all of those. You've got more options as well. So if I use Goggle Finance here I can grab the symbol and I could say instead of price I could say volume. Then I could Copy and Paste that throughout here. 

If you want to see details on what you could do with the Goggle Finance function go to Help, Function List, and then from here you can look for Goggle Finance, click Learn More, and then it gives you all the details including all of the different attributes that you can use. So Price is the default. You saw I used the Volume. But you could do all sorts of different things. Marketcap, the price it opened, the low, the high, all sorts of different things.

Note you're still going to get a delay here. It's going to be about twenty minutes delayed I assume. But it's a lot better than just the closing price for each day. You could flush this out and make a really useful spreadsheet here. You could add the number of shares you own and multiple it by the stock price you see to get the current value. Different things like that. Add styling and all. You could bookmark this page and just simply go back to it. 

But if you do want to go and use this data in Numbers you can. If you select this data here and use Command C to copy and then switch to Numbers you can paste it in. When I paste it in there it includes the styles. I'm going to Undo that and I'm going to use Edit and then Paste and Match Style or Option Command V. You can see it follows along with the current style that's there. That way if I've done things like, for instance, I've set these cells here to be Currency, you know, and these here to have thousand separators in them for instance. When I copy new data from here and then I switch to Numbers and then I go to Paste it in using Shift Option Command V it'll keep the current format for everything. 

So I can have a complex table here in Numbers that has all sorts of things like the number of shares owned for each one. Then a calculation here for the number of shares owned times the current price. I can copy and paste that in here. Add some headings. Then I could also add other columns like Purchase Price and use that to calculate the change in value. So simply the number of shares owned times the current price minus the number of shares owned times the original purchase price. You could see the change there and you can copy and paste that throughout.

Now if you wanted to update this information you can just go back to your Goggle Sheet, select all of the data that you need. Command C to Copy. Go to Numbers. Select the equivalent cells there. Paste and Match Style. It updates the prices and volumes. The your formulas and numbers update the value and change as well.

So for some it may be worthwhile to keep all of this in Numbers. Maybe you've got some complex things in here. Maybe you've got some charts and things you maintain. Then you copy the data from the Goggle Sheet to update things. Or some may just want to create a complex spreadsheet right here in Goggle Sheet and just go to that and not use Numbers at all.